“Two?” she repeated vaguely.

“Yes; Mrs. Frobisher and Miss Wrayne.  You can’t give me up to both of them.”

“Both?” she repeated again.  She could not condescend to specify; it would be ridiculous, and as it was, she felt her dignity hopelessly shaken.  The tears came into her eyes.

“Yes.  And neither of them wants me—­they haven’t got any use for me.  Mrs. Frobisher is married already, and Miss Wrayne took the trouble last night to let me feel that, so far as she was concerned, I hadn’t made it all right, and couldn’t.  I thought I had rather a cold parting with you, Alice, but it was quite tropical to what you left me to.”  A faint smile, mingled with a blush of relenting, stole into her face, and he hurried on.  “I don’t suppose I tried very hard to thaw her out.  I wasn’t much interested.  If you must give me up, you must give me up to some one else, for they don’t want me, and I don’t want them.”  Alice’s head dropped lover, and he could come nearer now without her seeming to know it.  “But why need you give me up?  There’s really no occasion for it, I assure you.”

“I wished,” she explained, “to show you that I loved you for something above yourself and myself—­far above either—­”

She stopped and dropped the hand which she had raised to fend him off; and he profited by the little pause she made to take her in his arms without seeming to do so.  “Well,” he said, “I don’t believe I was formed to be loved on a very high plane.  But I’m not too proud to be loved for my own sake; and I don’t think there’s anything above you, Alice.”

“Oh yes, there is!  I don’t deserve to be happy, and that’s the reason why I’m not allowed to be happy in any noble way.  I can’t bear to give you up; you know I can’t; but you ought to give me up—­indeed you ought.  I have ideals, but I can’t live up to them.  You ought to go.  You ought to leave me.”  She accented each little sentence by vividly pressing herself to his heart, and he had the wisdom or the instinct to treat their reconciliation as nothing settled, but merely provisional in its nature.

“Well, we’ll see about that.  I don’t want to go till after breakfast, anyway; your mother says I may stay, and I’m awfully hungry.  If I see anything particularly base in you, perhaps I sha’n’t come back to lunch.”

Dan would have liked to turn it alt off into a joke, now that the worst was apparently over; but Alice freed herself from him, and held him off with her hand set against his breast.  “Does mamma know about it?” she demanded sternly.

“Well, she knows there’s been some misunderstanding,” said Dan, with a laugh that was anxious, in view of the clouds possibly gathering again.

“How much?”

“Well, I can’t say exactly.”  He would not say that he did not know, but he felt that he could truly say that he could not say.

She dropped her hand, and consented to be deceived.  Dan caught her again to his breast; but he had an odd, vague sense of doing it carefully, of using a little of the caution with which one seizes the stem of a rose between the thorns.